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Lithium-air batteries: Their time has come
- Fej 10y ago> The new battery, brainchild of Ju Li of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is some way from commercialisation, but its design is such that commercialising it should not be hard. Well, here's hoping. I always feel skeptical of technologies that just can't leave the lab, though.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoI don't get it. It contains its own oxygen in an electrolyte matrix. So it isn't any lighter than existing lithium batteries? What's the point?
- deepinthewoods 10y ago>...prototype stores twice as much juice as the lithium-ion cells the Gigafactory will turn out, and which could eventually do better than that.
- loeg 10y agoTwice as much on a per-volume basis? Or per-weight?
- jacquesm 10y agoEnergy density is measured in J/L, so volume.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoSpecific energy is measured all sorts of ways. J/L is not very helpful for cars at all. So this battery will probably not be very interesting for transportation?
- jschwartzi 10y agoJust because the energy density is measured in a certain way, it doesn't then follow that the energy density when measured in a certain way is going to be significantly worse.
- jacquesm 10y agoJ/L is actually one of the more important ways to measure battery efficiency for transportation. In many discussions around this theme you'll find this to be used in comparison with a gas tank for size and that ultimately translates into range, arguably the most important feature of an electric car. Higher energy density means higher range, all other things being equal, and with the weight of cars being what they already are a battery weighing a few hundred pounds would be perfectly acceptable. So J/L is actually very helpful.
- nikdaheratik 10y agoPer-weight is almost double current lithium batteries. But the much bigger issue it solves seems to be the energy loss versus other types of lithium-air batteries which can lose up to 30% to heat, versus 8% in the lithium-oxygen battery.
- cptskippy 10y agoDid we not read the same article? Lithium Air batteries could offer up to 4x the energy density, this one is 2x. Part of the reason this hasn't been done before is that previously the oxygen introduced to the battery was from the air and other components of air damaged and degraded the battery rapidly. This battery is sealed with all the Oxygen it needs as a LiO mixture stored in a cobalt matrix to stabilize it. Thus is doesn't degrade.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nikdaheratik 10y agoThe MIT press release has more details, but the cathodes are half the weight of the current Lithium batteries and so can store almost double the energy for a given weight.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoProve that it can survive in the wild without becoming a firebomb, and we'll talk.
- thatcat 10y agoThis is an unreasonable standard that doesn't hold true for gasoline or other fuels. The byproduct of having something that has a high energy density is that it has a lot of energy to dissipate when things fail.
- altcognito 10y agoYes and no. Yes it is an unreasonable standard of safety for cars (and maybe planes) today. No, it's unreasonable to allow things to blow up in close quarters like on a laptop.
- enraged_camel 10y agoI don't get how a laptop exploding is less acceptable than a car or an airplane exploding.
- NEDM64 10y agoBecause a car won't explode due to malfunction, and not on your reproductive organs.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoThat makes no sense. Why do you think motorcycles are called "crotch rockets"?
- vkou 10y agoFor their speed/weight ratio? Certainly not because they typically don't explode... Outside of Schwarzenegger films. Contrary to what Hollywood tells us, mopeds, bicycles, cars, trucks, motorcycles, and boats almost never explode (Airplanes occasionally explode. Rockets frequently explode.) They certainly don't explode as frequently as your average laptop battery.
- Animats 10y agoLithium-air potentially has great energy density. The theoretical limit is near that of gasoline. So there's been a lot of work in this area, going back decades. There are lots of problems. This is a possible solution to one of about six major problems with this chemistry. It's a step forward, though. This research project used iridium, which is a problem. Total world production of iridium is only about 10 metric tons a year, and it sells for about $14,000/kg. A production technology is going to need something cheaper.
- bonzini 10y agoDo you have a reference to the usage of iridium?
- milankragujevic 10y ago"Iridium is one of the nine least abundant stable elements in Earth's crust, having an average mass fraction of 0.001 ppm in crustal rock; gold is 40 times more abundant, platinum is 10 times more abundant, and silver and mercury are 80 times more abundant." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium#cite_note-greenwood-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium#cite_note-greenwood-5
- ralfd 10y agoSilver is only double as abundant as Gold?
- brianwawok 10y agoBut 20x less demand dating back thousands of years. Weird huh?
- bluejekyll 10y agoThere was a great article I read about this question a few years ago, I couldn't find it though. Basically the question was why gold and not silver, platinum, etc., as the desireable metal for commerce/jewelry. The answer lies in golds uniqueish properties, it is rare (not the rarest), it is unique in color (platinum is hard to distinguish from other metals by sight), where gold is confused for other things or to determine its quality a simple bite test will determine its quality, without needing to melt it down (unlike silver colored metals), it's soft enough to be easily formed into jewelry.
- sevenless 10y agoThere are more dangerous combinations of chemicals than lithium superoxide mixed intimately with lithium, but there aren't many.
- saulrh 10y agoIs it worse than gasoline? If so, by how much?
- tener 10y agoMy guess is: gasoline doesn't actually contain oxygen which means it needs it from external source to explode. Here you have everything prepackaged by desing.
- witty_username 10y ago*design
- etatoby 10y agoWhich means we are on the right track towards standard science fiction "power packs," which notoriously double as improvised bombs.
- NeutronBoy 10y agoWith 'safety limiters' that you can reprogram or disable in about 5 seconds with no other tools.
- hristov 10y agoPlease warn us if something is paywalled.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoTalk to me when you can make 10,000 of them and sell them at a profit at only 10% more than equivalently sized LiPo chemistries. Seriously battery breakthroughs have a reputation of being nice tricks in the lab that are infeasible in production. So before I get excited I really want to see a mass quantity of batteries made. All that aside, I think finding a way to finesse the reaction one proton at a time like cells do would be a bigger win. I want a battery that runs on ATP.
- simplemath 10y agoYou are a battery that runs on ATP
- chris_va 10y agoCombined with a form of fusion, we have all the energy we would ever need
- RangerScience 10y ago"Thermodynamics doesn't work that way!" "Where did you learn physics, Neo?" http://hpmor.com/chapter/64 http://hpmor.com/chapter/64
- hinkley 10y agoNo, YOU are a battery that runs on ATP. Wait, what are we doing?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dzhiurgis 10y agoSoylent green
- etatoby 10y agoThere's a reason slavery was* one of the most energy efficient tecnologies, until it was banned on obvious ethical grounds. * although "Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 21 million-29 million to 46 million." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery
- slfnflctd 10y agoFinding a way to so dramatically reduce energy loss during recharges and also retain capacity so well over 100+ cycles is pretty significant. I was not expecting to read about that level of advance.
- devindotcom 10y agoInterestingly, NASA just announced Li-Air batteries are one of its long shot research programs: http://www.nasa.gov/aero/five-new-ideas-to-be-explored-by-nasa-aeronautics-teams http://www.nasa.gov/aero/five-new-ideas-to-be-explored-by-na...
- tim333 10y agoSounds very promising. There is more detail in the MIT News article: http://news.mit.edu/2016/new-lithium-oxygen-battery-greatly-improves-energy-efficiency-longevity-0725 http://news.mit.edu/2016/new-lithium-oxygen-battery-greatly-... Sounds quite stable: >“With a typical battery, if you overcharge it, it can cause irreversible structural damage or even explode,” Li says. But with the nanolithia battery, “we have overcharged the battery for 15 days, to a hundred times its capacity, but there was no damage at all.” >In cycling tests, a lab version of the new battery was put through 120 charging-discharging cycles, and showed less than a 2 percent loss of capacity, indicating that such batteries could have a long useful lifetime. > Overall, the new battery system is “very scalable, cheap, and much safer” than lithium-air batteries, Li says.
- chubs 10y agoThe place to watch re battery tech, in my opinion, is the RC hobby scene. Eg hobby king will sell you, for $10, a lithium graphene battery which will pump out 60C (eg for a 2 amp-hour battery, it'll give you 120A!). It's incredible whats out there for the non-risk-averse hobbyists.
- raihansaputra 10y agomaybe it's easier to innovate in the rc space due to some factors. such as hobbyist takes warnings and limitations seriously (e.g. charging with specialized chargers and use "blast-proof" charging bags), and sizes are quite standardised for use. having that much caution for mass-produced item usage is quite hard.
- dharma1 10y agohttp://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2592234 http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2592234
- raihansaputra 10y agomaybe it's easier to innovate in the rc space due to some factors. such as hobbyist takes warnings and limitations seriously (e.g. charging with specialized chargers and use "blast-proof" charging bags), and sizes are quite standardised for use. having that much caution for mass-produced item usage is quite hard.
- tgb 10y agoSo LiO2 has only been isolated at temperatures up to 40K, says Wikipedia. Oxygen is a solid at that temperature. Is this prototype also at 40K?
- notimetorelax 10y agoArticle explains that they don't use pure oxygen molecules. Basically two solids oscillating between themselves.
- tgb 10y agoMy point of bringing up the melting point of oxygen is that if the LiO2 is only stable at temperatures where O2 is solid and the advantages of the method are that it avoids the state change in O2, then why not just operate a 'normal' Li-air battery at that temperature? This would also avoid the state change. I'm sure there are good reasons, and just pointing out that the article's motivation is a little lacking.
- notacoward 10y agoAm I the only one who noticed that the author's name is Li, which is also the chemical symbol for lithium?
- zeristor 10y agoA matrix of cobalt oxide? Isn't that going to make it heavy?